I Dream That Humans and Whales Will One Day Work Together to Save Each Other!

I have hit 3 whale carcasses in the 51 years I've worked as a sea captain. My vessel was also damaged by a seaquake in 1974 so I know firsthand how dangerous these events can be. My experience caused me to wonder if any of the 3 carcasses I hit had been killed by seismic shock waves. I also wanted to know how the most prolific divers on our planet were able to flourish for 50 million years in the oceans where 90% of all earthquakes occur. The only way they could survive as a diving species all these years was if they could detect seismic precursor signals weeks in advance. The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became to find the truth. If whales can indeed detect earthquakes weeks before the main shock, and I'm convinced that they can, maybe they can teach us their methods. If so, whales could save the lives of millions of people. If this happens, then humans would be obliged to save whales in return. Wow... two unrelated intelligent species, one living in the ocean and the other living on land, working together to save each other! That's my dream.

WHALES CAN SAVE HUMANS

WHALES CAN SAVE HUMANS BY PREDICTING MAJOR EARTHQUAKES WEEKS IN ADVANCE!

LEARNING THE SECRETS OF WHALES CAN SAVE HUMANS!

Earthquakes (including tsunamis) killed more humans than all other disasters put together, claiming nearly a million lives in the last 15 years alone. The number of deaths predicted in the near future is 100 times greater than the past due to the growing population. And it seems that unless we react now a series of major seismic disasters could wipe out the United States, killing your entire family within 24 hours!

Please do not ignore this warning! FEMA has no idea how to save your family. If you want to protect your loved ones, pay close attention to what you learn here!

The US West Coast is overdue for a Mega-Thrust quake along the Cascadia Fault!

If you doubt Sheppard Smith, watch this National Geographic Video:

And pay close attention to the video below if your family lives within 700 miles of Saint Louis, Missouri or Memphis, Tennessee!

As scary as the above sounds, these events are not the greatest danger your families faces. Watch the video below about the supervolcano at the center of Yellowstone National Park. This event will be 100 million times more deadly than the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima:

Looking at the odds that one of the three above events might occur is frightening. When you add the likelihood that strong seismic shocks from the first tectonic eruption will travel a few thousand miles and trip the second and the third event, it becomes frightening beyond anyone’s wildest nightmare. The fallout from such a one-two-three punch would spread two feet of volcanic ash all across our country, spelling the end of the United States.

But if I am right, we can get a 3-week warning before hell arrives!

WHALES CAN DETECT MAJOR EARTHQUAKES AND VOLCANIC EXPLOSIONS IN ADVANCE!

How do we know this? The answer is simple: whales flee from the site of major earthquakes 3 to 4 weeks before they occur.

There are many modern and historical accounts of this phenomenon. Click this link for a modern example from 2016 in which whales appeared early in San Francisco Bay to avoid a monstrous 7.8 magnitude quake that devastated Ecuador’s coastline. And below is a historical account of whales fleeing long before a big quake:

1835 Feb 20: Effect of the Earthquake at Sea.—On the 20th February (1835), the same day that Concepcion, Chile, and nearby places were destroyed, Captain Whitton, in thewhaling ship Nile of this port, was cruising for whales off the coast of Chile, in latitude 39° W. He felt the shock so sensibly that the spars and rigging over his head shook in such a manner that it was dangerous to stand under them. Thinking that the vessel had run around, he immediately wore ship and hove the lead, but finding no bottom with twenty fathoms of line, concluded it was an earthquake.

On a subsequent visit to Talcahuano, his suspicions were confirmed, in the desolation and ruin which that once thriving port, then presented; as also in the fact, that the water in the bay was five or six feet lower than the usual depth. Captain Townsend states that he has been on the coast of Chili a number of voyages during the same month, and thinks he never knew such a scarcity of whales, fish, and fowls, as in the present year. It is the general opinion that the earthquake has had a tendency to drive them from the coast. Shock was very sensibly felt by Captain Cotton, of ship Loper, 600 miles from land.—New Bedford Gazette. (Army and Navy Chronicle Volume 1, 1835) (link — see page 210). You can also find the story in the right column page 405 of this book)

Capt. Townsend is reporting that whales off the Chilean coast could sense the quake coming, and left long before it struck.

The only problem with this idea is that the focus of the quake was 41 km below the seafloor. The sound of such an event would spread out in a 360-degree circle the entire 41 km before it reached the water. It would have been about as loud as if the whale has passed a little gas. On the other hand, a precursor signal from the quake might have surprised a whale causing it to scamper away? The opinion of the scientists was based on the hypothesis of Richardson et al. (1995) said that cetaceans flee before loud sounds injure them.

The noise from such a deep event would spread out in a 360-degree circle the entire 41 km before it reached the water. It would have been about as loud as if the whale had passed a little gas. In the opinion of this research, the whale scampered away after sensing a weak geomagnetic precursor from the quake.

It’s also worth noting that all calving grounds are far from quake zones. My group examined whale calving areas around the world and found that these nurseries are completely void of dangerous seismic activity. The location of these earthquake-safe zones must have been passed down from mother to daughter for many millions of years.

The video below offers a good lesson in why aquatic mammals that have evolved in the oceans for 55 million years know how to detect major earthquakes and volcanic explosions.

WHY DID WHALES EVOLVE THIS ABILITYIN THE FIRST PLACE?

Professor Peter Wille, the former head of NATO’s Undersea Research Center, writes in his book Sound Images of the Ocean that the marine environment is disturbed by “the rumblings of about 7,000 outstanding, dramatic geodynamic earthquake events per year worldwide, each of a thousand tons TNT-equivalent and more” (page 38). His job was to determine the acoustic differences between underwater nuclear explosions and natural catastrophic seafloor eruptions, so he ought to know what he is talking about. Professor Wille adds, “If evolution has achieved inurement of marine mammals against such terrifying noise events is speculative though probable.”

A thousand tons of TNT is almost equal to the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Could whales flourish for 55 million years with 7,000 Hiroshima bombs going off near them every year if they received no warning whatsoever? Changes in the surrounding water pressure generated when the sea floor either explodes or dances up and down rapidly are a hundred times more deadly to diving mammals than to similar mammals on land because diving mammals capture air and bring it underwater in their sinuses and lungs. Water is not compressible, but the air is. So when the water above an earthquake transmits the full force of the disturbance, whales, fishes with swim bladders, and sea turtles will feel unimaginably intense torture in their cranial air spaces.

Every small boy knows what happens if he submerges his head underwater and smashes two stones together. A solid blow causes pain in and around his sinuses. Similarly, the passage of earthquake shock waves through a whale’s sinuses makes the sinuses contract and expand with dangerous and damaging intensity.

HOW SEISMIC SHOCKS DAMAGE
WHALE SINUSES

Underwater earthquake shocks (aka; seaquakes) are not felt as a single blow because the force that causes the shock waves is not one big bang. Rather, the rapid pressure change comes as a series of wrenching snaps, as massive rocks, twisted and strained out of alignment by forces accumulated slowly over centuries, suddenly lurch back toward an alignment that relieves the stress. The result is that solid rock, which normally moves only with the passing of geological ages, accelerates briefly to 8000 kilometers per hour, unleashing huge quantities of energy and creating a series of violent hydrostatic pressure waves.

If this snap back to realignment occurs in a vertical plane, as it does during both normal and reverse (thrust) faulting, and the hypocenter (focus) is between 8 and 20 km below the rock-water interface, the p-waves will impact the rock-water interface and cause the seabed to dance up and down like the skin of a drum many miles in diameter. This sudden up and down motion pushes and pulls at the bottom of the incompressible water, generating a series of low-frequency changes in the surrounding water pressure that speed towards the surface at 1,500 meters per second.

Sound waves moving through a liquid consist of half cycles of compressions (positive pressure phases) and dilations (negative pressure phases). During the compression phase, the air in the cranial sinuses of a pod of diving whales would rapidly compress. During the dilatation phase, the air inside their heads would instantly expand.

Diving exposes the cranial air spaces in cetaceans to dramatic changes in pressure. Boyle’s Law states that the product of the pressure and volume of a gas is a constant for a fixed amount of gas at a fixed temperature. Therefore, as cetaceans dive, the increasing ambient pressure will cause a decrease in the volume of air held in a closed chamber (e.g., sinuses, air cells, middle ear, air sacs, nasal cavity, larynx, trachea, and lungs). These divers encounter rapid changes in pressures during diving and ascent back to the surface. These pressure changes pose a challenge to maintaining the structural integrity of air-filled chambers, particularly those with rigid walls (such as the paranasal sinuses).

Cetaceans are the most prolific divers our world has ever known. The most common injury in ALL DIVERS (whales included) is sinus and middle ear barotrauma caused by rapid and excessive changes in diving pressures that exceed their ability to counterbalance.

Going back many thousands of years, trying to find out if land-dwelling animals can detect seismic precursors a few hours in advance has been the goal of many scholars. They failed because they overlooked the fact that ten times as many strong/major seismic upheavals occur under the oceans’ surface in the backyard of whales, and dolphins.

Dangerous changes in water pressure induced by natural seafloor disturbances have batter whales for 55 million years. If would be impossible for them to flourish without seismic prediction abilities simply because nine out of every ten earthquakes that happen on our planet occur along mid-ocean ridge faults and along subduction faults near the edges of continents. These oceanic fault zones are 10 times longer than the faults on land.

CAN WHALES ESCAPE EVERY EARTHQUAKE?

Seabed upheavals weaker than magnitude 6 do not always release detectable precursors. Indeed, our data shows that events between 4.5 and 6 are far more dangerous to whales than larger events because they catch the whales by surprise. Upheavals weaker than 4.5 rarely cause injury because the changes in ambient pressure above these events can usually be counterbalanced by the whales.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WHALES CAN’T ESCAPE?

Because the air-filled cranial hollows of whales serve as acoustic mirrors that enable their echo-navigation and echolocation, sinus injury can have devastating effects: it will not only prevent them from diving and feeding themselves but will also destroy their acoustic sense of direction.

In other words, an entire pod of submerged whales, busy feeding on squid, might be caught off-guard by a seaquake with no detectable precursors and suffer serious barotraumatic injuries in their cranial and middle ear air spaces to the point where their echo-navigation system fails. They are left incapable of anything but swimming downstream, eventually being washed into a sandy area by the incoming tide—this is why whale beach.

Resistance to swimming against any drag force presented by the flow of the current will act like a wind vane, turning the streamlined bodies of the lost cetaceans and pointing them downstream toward the path of least resistance. Because the downstream current is the same energy that carries each grain of sand to beaches, lost whales will eventually be guided to a sandy area that is in the process of accretion, not to an area where sand is eroding. The wind-driven surface currents, which often increase the flow of the incoming tide, will also help guide the lost, dehydrated, and malnourished whales to the sandy beach.

Since natural and human-induced disturbances in ambient water pressure cause identical barotraumatic injuries to underwater mammals, those responsible for creating man-made disturbances must deny the danger of undersea upheavals least they reveal how their instruments do the same. Said differently, if the World’s Navies and the Oil Industry expose how nature has caused beachings for millions of years, they also expose their own guilt.

Whale scientists have never made this connection because they are mostly sponsored by the US Navy and the oil industry who are trying to cover up their own slaughter of marine life. But other scientists have connected the dots. For example, once we learn exactly what whales detect before major earthquakes, we can try our best to duplicate these signals. If lucky, we will be able to use what we learn to frighten whales away before dangerous oil and military activities even begin.

Whales saving humans would also be a two-way street. If they teach us how to predict major sesimic disasters weeks in advance, we will be honor-bound to save them, and foolish not to.

GET INVOLVED

I need lots of volunteers—not money! I need people to dig around on the Internet and help me find whaling catch records going back 300 years. We need to compare the success or failure of whaling in a certain area with the record of major earthquakes. If we can show that whaling ships caught only a few whales prior to a major earthquake, then we can show that the whales moved out of the area because they knew a big quake was coming. Languages besides English are a plus so we can broaden our search efforts.

As soon as we get ~30 researchers, we will set up a procedure so folks can be more productive. But my 53 years of research convinces me that what we’re looking for is on the Internet or in large metropolitan libraries. I have no doubt that will find the ancedontal evidence that whales do indeed detect major earthquakes many weeks in advance. We will move to phase two once we have the evidence to support the hypothesis.

I might add that predicting earthquakes weeks in advance is the Holy Grail of Seismology. A successful effort will no doubt win the Nobel Prize! And we could then use this knowledge to save millions of human lives and even save whales at the same time.

WHO AM I?

I am a 75-year-old retired commercial sea captain with an unlimited master’s license and 50 years of ocean-going experience. Understanding how whales protect themselves from violent natural seafloor upheavals has obsessed me all these years.